my machines

a power-hungry and underperfoming Pentium 4 Prescott system
(3.06GHz/1GB RAM)

I currently primarily use the old P4 and it's still pretty decent at
2.66GHz and 0.5GB of RAM. It also sports a DVD-Writer and 250GB HDD, all
SATA. The other systems are used by those close to me for one reason or
another.

The Dell Inspiron is my most recent machine. It got 3-year warranty on
it (which was quite a surprise) so I'm not touching its insides. This
system currenly dual-boots with Windows XP which a relative of mine uses
for music production, a task he claims FLOSS can't satisfactorily
fulfill.

I should note the other systems I use at work:

An HP Core 2 Duo Conroe 1.86GHz/1GB RAM desktop, my primary workhorse
for building Debian, which dual-boots with Windows XP since it
actually is a shared machine for those I work with in the area (about
a dozen people), and of course a bit over-powered for what is claimed
to be an 'email-checking' and 'printing' machine. I just manage to
find time in-between these email/printing sessions to have it do the
grunt-work.

a recently-acquired Pentium M 1.7GHz/500MB RAM HP/Compaq laptop which
provides quite decent performance too and a claimed battery life of
2+ hrs. This system also dual-boots with Windows XP since nearly all
that we need at work uses it. It's also the system where I do
software/programming study and miscellaneous reading on since it's
the only system at work I have exclusive access to.
[expansion/update]

I've neglected to mention the other 2 systems I'm not interested in,
which I use at work for some work tasks, both Windows-based (and going
as far back as Windows 98!), and both under-powered but pretty
well-suited to their specific tasks (except that I still have to use
micro-floppy diskettes), and also uniteresting because they aren't
running my favorite operating system, Debian.

That's 6 systems in total all running Debian, 3 of which dual-boot with
Windows XP, 1 dual-booting with Windows Vista (the Core 2 laptop), and 2
(including my primary system, mt first) purely Debian. Of these, the
only one with internet access is the desktop HP system at work actually,
mainly because web-access in SA isn't nearly as affordable as I'd like.